Category: Spirituality

God gave you a left hand and a right hand. On one side there are things that happen to you and you’re the victim or receptive or yin. On the other side, you are the actor, the thinker, the yang. You can’t reduce it to one. It’s both, well at least both. I’m not that smart enough to know how many hands reality has. But you can’t say that you’re a total victim, and you can’t say that you’re a total egotistical controller. We’re all both in varying degrees. So can we please meet in the center? Can we have a mosh pit of love and understanding. I know that some people are “unrelatable” but people change. I used to be a frothing right winger. I grew up. Let’s all stop being total know-it-alls that are completely convinced that the other side is wrong. Certainty is poison. There is no certainty in a complicated system of oppositional actors. Humility, Please?!

By the way, WTF is wrong with you Donald Trump. I’m talking to you as one of those horrible trannies that you want to cleanse out of the military. (BTW, only we can say tranny. Don’t fucking say it if you’re not a tranny.) Grow the fuck up motherfucker! Simmer down my brother. You’re not fucking Christ. Lord. The amount of intellectual certainty in this budding Aquarian Age is just too much. Yeah, we kind of know things because of science, but science is wrong every day.

OK I feel better. It’s such a fucking disaster. Center. Breath. Ground. Know that you’re a dumb ass ape. Life is work.

Life is elementally exciting. It has always been. One of the oldest tricks in the book is to try and convince your neighbor that you’ve seen something before or that life has been tamed, but it always surprises. The thing that makes life interesting is that life is self-destructive. We’re eating each other and being eaten in a giant destructive orgy of immeasurable combination and emasculation. We’re in the soup. The soup is us. And it’s getting soupier. We are all one life. You were never really born. You were a sperm that got whittled off of your antecedent being that was whittled off of its antecedent being going back billions of years. No one alive has ever died. We are one giant, non-local, spongiform blob of DNA, plasma, bone, and intention that is undulating on a rock in space and getting a tan. We’re here, we’re sphere, and who the fuck knows what is going to happen next.

Oh, well, there’s some ambulatory speck of us over there that says that they have it all figured out. You should probably trust that speck.

I grew up listening to Chris Cornell’s music as most other 90’s teenagers did. He was able to easily evince a feeling of sensitive yet aggressive angst with operatic bravura. This ability most likely came from his own struggles with mental health and personal darkness.

I understand what it’s like to be artistic and depressive. I’ve been suicidal for long periods of my life. I’m not suicidal now and haven’t been since January of 2016 when I sort of figured out how to exist in my darkness. It’s work. Daily work. Artists and sensitives have to deal with their environment, and America as a country is very dark. America tries to wear this ridiculous, happy mask to try and convince the world that it’s “so happy!!!” However us sensitives get to swim in the darkness, seeing the realness that others might be able to ignore.

There is relief of mental health troubles, but overcoming these struggles requires the best in us. I’ve found ancient Zen and Taoist concepts of letting go, nothingness, and peace to help me cope. I’ve also found solace in the passion and suffering of Jesus although I’m definitely not a mainstream Christian by any measure. I also use modern mental health techniques like dialectical behavioral therapy to address my anxieties and extreme emotions. I try and use a holistic and whole body approach to tackling mental health concerns, and I believe I’ve found a modicum of success in this respect.

I don’t really blame people for committing suicide because it’s a tough row to hoe, but I definitely think it is a tragic error that tends to amplify your suffering onto other people. I’ve come to see suicide as “self murder,” and I believe that murder is not really helpful in most if not all circumstances. Through this re-framing of concept, I’ve been able to take the romanticism out of my old obsessions with suicide. Mental health concerns challenge us to radically confront ourselves, and this is often a most precipitous mountain to scale.

But I want to say that there are other climbers on this mountain willing to help you if you reach out for help, which is my final point: always reach out for help. If you humble yourself and say “I just can’t figure out how to live,” most likely someone will be there to help you, and often this act of letting go can free us from the notion that we have to fix everything ourselves.

Hi I’m Zeronom. It’s Transgender Day of Visibility, and I happen to be classified as a transgender person in our society. It’s not who I am. I am a spirit that has manifested in this lifetime to enjoy planet Earth. My gender expression, or the style by which I communicate is what it is. I don’t really know what I am. I know that I am something, and then that there is whole lot of ignorance.

I do know that from a young age, I really wanted to be friends with the other humans that were called girls. I wanted to act like them. I wanted to be expressive and dance around and sing and be fun. I didn’t know what boy or girl was until I learned that I wasn’t doing “boy” the right way, and therefore I was gay, queer, a faggot, etc. It was an attempt by society to split me and my friends apart into acceptable and unacceptable categories so as to split us up and make us easier to manage and manipulate.

We tell our young boys that they are acting “too girly” so to instruct them on what is the proper and correct way to be a man. This seems on the surface to be a logical extension of a system of ethics, and many Americans see this idea of what is the “right way to be male” as inherently tied into moral and religious issues like whether or not someone is reliable or friendly or helpful or dangerous. But gender is not what most people think it is. Gender is mostly just a sophisticated form of style.

When I get excited about something, I tend to be vocal, and expressive in a physical manner. I might be very talkative or vulnerable in my expression. This is just me. It’s not male or female or whatever. We create those categories, and we as a society say “we should have two genders and not four” or “real men don’t express themselves that way.” The individual people are wavy and dark, and the strictures and codes that we put on ourselves collectively are bright and straight, and the more curvy among us are constantly scraping up against these arbitrary old fashioned concepts.

It’s not that I as a transgender person wants to destroy gender. No, I just desire an upgrade for gender. Gender is currently an 8-bit concept, and we want at least some Nintendo 64 Gender action up in this place already.

When a person is born as a biological female, chromosomally female so as to speak, and they say “I want to have short hair, I want to wear pants, and I don’t want to wear makeup,” they are tolerated. When a person is born as biological male, chromosomally male so as to speak, and they say “I want to wear a dress, I want to put on makeup during the day, and I want to be very expressive with with my mannerisms,” they are shamed to the deepest part of hell and their lives are physically threatened constantly. There are definitely places where this is not true, but it is still the average truth of America.

I’m not ashamed. I love myself. I’m so happy to be me. I hope we can get along. Because I’m here, and most of us are here just to be friendly and help keep this boat above water.

The most important spiritual principle you can learn is that spirituality is ultimately pointless. You are a child on a swing set swinging from heaven to hell and back again, and having the time of your eternal life. Hell gets just so scary that you want to go back to heaven again, and then heaven gets so boring that you want to jump into the fire again. Repeat. Repeat. Laugh. Repeat. If you want to go to heaven, give up on Earth. But Earth is not evil. It’s just forgetting that you are really an angel because you got absolutely tired of that.

I think what I most try to do to be sane is to be kind to myself. I used to be so angry and judgmental. I was a terror. Now, I’ve really given up on that. Jesus famously instructed his followers to love your enemies, well often our number one enemy is ourselves. I always thought that whatever this “me” thing was, it was definitely out to totally screw up my life. Now, I just go with life. We’re going this way this week? We’re gaining a few pounds this week? OK, let’s see what happens! Cool! 🙂

And the ways we construct our definitions of why something is terrible are usually quite arbitrary anyways. We think “if I gain weight, I will be unhappy!” We never know how this movie called life is going to turn out. Life is so much more complicated than that. If you really open your eyes to how often your nice little fairy tale narrative doesn’t actually work, you will be blown away by the wonder at how the hell this thing works anyway!

I also really like the quote by Jesus that said “judge not, lest you be judged.” I think most people misinterpret this passage. I understand it to be that if we go around judging everyone else up and down, we will judge ourselves the harshest, and it will be entirely uncomfortable being in our own consciousness.

So I’m working on being nice and respectful to myself. I definitely was raised to be very harsh on myself, and I just about died from it. Now, my perfectly imperfect self is my friend, not my enemy. What fun!

Life is just too amazing for words. I just bask in the glow of the light of love from above and below and all around. I’ve had a tough life, but I feel blessed with my struggle. It has been the tiny irritant that produced the marvelous pearl within my oyster of a life. Shucks, I am all open up and shining to the world. My pearl on display. What I thought was a disaster is now my highest grade.

I think Jesus was just a turned on hippie wandering through the Levantine desert looking for a little bit of resurrection. It doesn’t even matter if he existed, but he, or they or we exist. Jesus is the idea that we can become something beautiful in the midst of disaster. It’s possible old Ishoa (that’s how his name would have been pronounced in Aramaic, found some funky toadstools or some Acacia brew that had some of the magic messengers in them. Humans are quite intelligent beings, and we’ve been finding ways to get high for as long as, well, forever. Somebody got turned on, and they wrote a story. The word Gospel is derived from the roots of “good” and “spell” which means that it was a good story. It’s the story that matters. But stories like myths are vehicles for getting us to understand ourselves better.

When you have a shamanic journey or Joseph Campbellian Hero’s Quest kind of experience, you are usually lacking for words to explain what happened. You know that there was a big ass change, but you don’t really know how to communicate it to other sentient beings that you are bumping into on this rock. So you start to use metaphors. “Dude, my consciousness was totally liquidated with love and connection to other beings, and the visuals I got were that I was inside of a whale!! It was awesome!” “OK Jonah, we get it, you’re a psychonaut, now are you going to finish that hummus or what?!” [A stoned guy in the back of the room scribbles down a drawing of Jonah inside of a Whale after he puts down his cannabis pipe].

We’re all desperately trying to figure out how to use our own machinery. Well some of us are decidedly not trying, but most people are trying to figure out a better way. It’s all just configurations, and the switches must be thrown from the inside. You can’t just sit down next to a Buddha statue and think that the statue is going to flip the switch for you. That is what’s called Spiritual Materialism. Ultimately, you don’t need any of those Buddha statues or cool stories about whales or a guy walking on water. You need to develop the muscle within so that you can flip those switches yourself. It is a workout. You have to get in spiritual shape. Everyone has a level of spiritual fitness that is objective although we cannot measure it with scientific equipment at present. That might happen in the future when the Midichlorian Detector 5000 Galaxy Urge Level Nexus comes out (did it come out yet?), but until then we have to go on our internal sensors. There is something there. I know it. It is real.

Find your peace. Once you build up that spiritual muscle, you can tell a mountain to move, and it will kindly get out of the way. I use a system of BLACK MAGICK. (Buddha, Laozi, Abraham, Christ, Krishna, Meditation, Alchemy,Gratitude, Intuition, Compassion, Karma). But we all have our own systems. Get to know yourself, and above all believe in the unbelievable. You need to be able to radically re-envision your life. Throw off the shackles of “crazy” and “strange.” You have to go crazy to get sane in the modern world. This is not to say that there is no right or wrong or whatever, but you have to understand that you can put down the rules for a while and then maybe pick them back up. Unfortunately life is much messier than the blurbs in the social studies textbook you lugged around in the 7th grade made it out to be. But you have a magical computer inside yourself! Learn to use this magical device, and you will survive! Because you are a human, which is a magical being of limitless possibility.